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"Please don't let me hear anything I cannot explain, I can't believe, I'll never believe in anything again."
The closing couplet on Elvis Costello's 13th album, Mighty Like A Rose, sees The Beloved Entertainer at his most pompous and pondermost.
To a mournful, fairgroundesque musical accompaniment (part of which, incidentally, forms the closing theme to Alan Bleasdale's tragi-comic TV series GBH), Costello gushes with clumsy sentiment as he casts a retrospective eye or four over his personal and professional past.
It comes at the end of what is perhaps the most inaccessible 56 minutes of Costello's recording career. Elvis appears wilfully obtuse most of the time, only occasionally identifying and hitting his target with any semblance of accuracy.
The initially disappointing single "The Other Side Of Summer” is ultimately one of the album's more successful moments, with Costello prodding the flipside of "Fun, Fun, Fun”, style placebo pop, complete with cynical swipes at the likes of John Lennon, Pink Floyd and the outdated hippy principles of the Beautiful Generation.
There is the usual pinpoint thumbnail sketches of sad and lonely lives ("All Grown Up”, "Georgie And Her Rival”), but high points are all too infrequent. Yet, Mighty Like A Rose has been hailed in some quarters as Costello's best album to date, despite its lack of coherence and direction.
At a time when Elvis might be expected to explain himself more than ever before, he is keeping a strange kind of media half-silence. Most requests for interviews have been turned down, with Costello seemingly only speaking to publications that might give him an easy ride. He had declined to speak to the NME, and the majority of interviews that have appeared in the British press – like this one – have been "bought in” from European magazines.
Perhaps Costello feels everything he has to say can be heard on the album, he has no need to justify himself in print. Certainly in this interview he gives away very little and leaves many questions unanswered.
Nowadays, he prefers to associate with musicians of his own generation, to look for – and even grope for – the way out of rock 'n' roll.
"I live in Ireland most of the time now, where I've managed to fit in the piano again; I didn't have space for it in London. I don't play it particularly well but I can get more imaginative melodies out of it than I can out of a guitar. I get down to work every day – in the garden if I can – to write rough drafts or short storyboards.
"Now I can work for long periods at a time and blast it out all day long, far more than I ever could in my flat in London, or on the road. I say 'write', but that's not strictly true, because I can't actually write music, I never learnt how. I've got a computer that transcribes what I tape on to my four track recorder as a score.
It's fairly rough, but it means that I can at least give something to the more classical musicians who I work with sometimes; they can't play things by ear in the tradition of rock and need the music to read. My father, who's a professional musician, was made to learn to read music by my grandfather. Afterwards, my father wanted to be a little more easy-going with me; he persuaded himself that I's learn in my own time… but I never did.”
Do you resent him for that?
"I would've liked him to have been a little more strict …. But I'm learning gradually. One day I'll probably take lessons, so that I know the basics – because it's sometimes very frustrating, a bit like being an illiterate novelist. I started feeling frustrated recently because of the fields I'm starting to work in more and more, like doing music for films. My not knowing the rudiments of music is a real nuisance for everybody; it gets in the way of everything.”
Do you feel that you've missed out on something because of this musical ignorance?
Not in terms of what I write. What I miss out on is being able to convey musical ideas in a way which orchestral musicians can understand. Because of my ignorance, sometimes I suggest things which they wouldn't have thought of, but I'm getting to the stage now where this naivety has outlasted its usefulness. Knowing the rudiments of music wouldn't, I think, change the way I write now. Several times in the last 12 years I've thought of giving up for a while to study, to catch up on what I've missed, so that I'd be able to perform the basics..”
Are the arrangements of your songs now more complex than before?
"I work today in the same way that I always worked with The Attractions, I record demo tapes – the musicians then may find things in them which I hadn't thought of; they interpret them in their own particular style. Mighty Like A Rose was recorded with fewer overdubs, it's more like a band, it suited the songs.
"With Spike, I experimented a lot more with the arrangements, whereas this album was done in a much more conventional way. I knew the guys who were playing on it better.
"I'm not being cynical. In 'How To Be Dumb,' 'All Grown Up', 'Harpies Bizarre,' 'After The Fall,' I'm watching others being cynical. Another distinctive feature of the album is the deliberate move not to have too many different perspectives in any one song. I talk about one emotion at a time, and keep the others for other tracks.
"Even though the record has nothing of the 'concept album' about it, it's still deliberately structured so as to tell a story. The train of ideas can be traced from one song through the next ; it goes from a state of despair to an attitude more of cynicism and ends with a fairly hopeful view.
"A song like 'Playboy To A Man' isn't as serious as all the others, it's a moment of light relief between two gloomier songs. If a record is nothing but an unbroken chain of really sombre stuff., it's not only depressing, but also bloody difficult to listen to. You can't take in, end to end, a stream of songs with the same basic message; you need a bit of variety. And 'Playboy To A Man' is there to break up the mood of the other songs and, ultimately, to highlight it.”
Nowadays, you're making 'grown-up' records. Have you turned respectable?
"When I started out, I toured all the time. As you get older you don't enjoy that as much so you try to make each tour different, the same goes for the records, they get further apart. I could speed up again… easily, but I'm not as volatile any more. I no longer feel that I have to react to everything, straight off, with the weapons I have at hand.
"Five years ago, I made Blood And Chocolate, a very simplistic pop album. I still love it and there's every chance I would make another record with that attitude, where you limit the options on the music… or maybe just an acoustic guitar and vocals … or even a record made up entirely of orchestral music, with no pop at all, but just as much aggression.
"Or maybe a record of my favourite songs, like the one I made last year. We'll pick the right moment to release it… And at the moment, I'm working on a piece of music for television.
"Without realising it, I try to distance myself from the obsessions of the last record because I'm scared of getting bored. Some musicians make a career out of doing the same record over and over again; I can't do that, I get bored. The idea of going back to something simple isn't completely out of the question. "Even I couldn't have made Mighty Like A Rose a couple of years back. Although the arrangements are what you notice
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further their career by more or less desperate means.
"When I was 22. everything was black or white to me. In a sense, that's still the case (laughs). I'm more intolerant now than ever before. Between 25 and 30 I was fairly tolerant of pop, I listened to a fair amount, I found the goods in groups whose records I wouldn't even dare to have in the house any more.
"I realise that I wasted a lot of time listening to insubstantial music, which I got nothing out of and which wore off too quickly, when I could have been listening to Louis Armstrong or music from the other side of the world, something a little more intriguing. Or I could have been reading a book or NOT listening to music, that's another alternative."
Your fans have got a lot older as well.
"The young 22-year-old journalist should be looking for Cubism, Stravinsky, the shocking moment. He should be looking for something that's vivid, original, not comparing it to anything, or the Sex Pistols. So why should they be interested in me? There's already a history to what I do, what I do already has a past."
Do you owe it to young people to show them something else, other emotions?
"If that were the case, I'd be sporting a white beard, like Moses, not a redone... I don't feel that I have that sort of responsibility. But people would like me to aim at just one particular audience. I don't go in for those sorts of constrictions. I've played just as successfully to kids of seven as I have in prisons. Besides. my 16-year-old son loves Jimi Hendrix. I don't believe in barriers of that sort.
"What could I teach young people? I've no idea; except what I feel; people can take from that what they will. Maybe a song isn't as complex or as profound as a great painting, but you hope that it has the same joy, the same life and spirit in it. That's what makes me believe in music: I haven't got any moral points beyond the obvious, that I may have sung about.
"Songs like 'Let Them Dangle' or 'Tramp The Dirt Down' express a very subjective point of view; I don't claim that there are any absolute truths in anything that I've written.
"Only the last track on the album, 'Couldn't Call It Unexpected', is very... I was going to say spiritual — the word's very awkward because the meaning's different nowadays. At the moment, 'spiritual' means U2 or Sinead O'Connor. The last verse of 'Couldn't Call It Unexpected' goes 'I can't believe I'll never believe in anything again'. At the moment that's the only philosophical statement that I feel in any position to make. All I can say is 'This is what I feel, if this is what you feel too, then this song is for you'. But you can easily not need my song."
Ireland is credited with a particular spiritual dimension. Is that justified, in your opinion?
"It's very difficult to attain the spiritual. Especially in Ireland at the moment, where there seems to be a big movement, in the wake of U2 and Sinead O'Connor, to assume that everybody born in the country has some sort of mystical understanding of cosmic miracles. It's a lot of old bollocks really.
"Ireland has got a wonderful tradition of music, but it's been sterilised and packaged. But it's also got loads of boring self-destruction legends—the fascination with half-dead pop stars, like Iggy, The Pogues or Lou Reed, the thrill at the idea that they might not finish the song.
"Which is an idea stolen from poets like Baudelaire. In the same spirit as this (pseudo) mystical dimension is a crude imitation of a profound and traditional music; music which in itself is mystical. I don't believe that it can be captured on record, it's a much more visceral thing. In any case. no sage or philosopher would waste his time with pop music."
One of the most astute observers in pop music, Elvis Costello is regarded as a figurehead and a spokesperson for many, whether he likes it or not.
The quality of his previous work means that any casual utterance is destined to be dissected in the future, and perhaps that's what makes him feel uncomfortable. Maybe he feels he doesn't have the answers — or even the questions — that the listening public wants to hear.
He tells us that no sage or philosopher would waste his time on pop music, so why would any intelligent human being waste even more time talking about it?
Mighty Like A Rose is apparently the best Elvis can do right now, and the crown of thorns rests uneasily on his head.
Translation: Vicki Whittakerl Marc Pechart
Additional material: Terry Staunton
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